THRILLER AUTHOR JOHN BAIRD ROGERS ON SETTING A SERIES IN THE NEAR FUTURE

John Baird Rogers studied creative writing in college and at The Loft in Minneapolis. His business experience in technology and biotech in the United States and Europe inform his stories. Readers interested in prognosticating the future with him can contact him through his website where you’ll also find more about him and his books, and links to sign up for his newsletter, and his other social media.  

Building a Story in the Near Future

I was on a panel several months ago where the issue of writing the future came up. Other members were writing the distant future. My Mayfield – Napolitani series takes place in the near future. A woman in the audience asked me, brow raised in question, “Why do you stick so close to the present. You must know you’re going to be wrong a lot of the time. These others,” she said, waving a hand at the rest of the panel. “For them, the far future is no problem. But for you it’s going to be obvious when you’re wrong.”

 

She was right. Check out my assurance that we’ll be riding trains all the time in just a few years. Phew! 

 

I gave her two reasons for the near-term future settings in my books: First, you have to write what you know, and what I know is technology and biotech, places like Vienna, Budapest, and the wild Big Bend of Florida. Second, I admitted that I painted myself into a corner. I got the idea for the first book, Fatal Score, during the arguments about Obamacare. I was working in biotechnology and was watching the cost of gene sequencing and analysis drop like a greased anvil. Perhaps, I thought, genetic analysis would give us the ability to determine whether increasingly expensive treatments would work in a given human or not. But the story had to be set in the future to allow that core idea to work.

 

About that sticky corner I painted myself into: Fatal Score, the first Mayfield – Napolitani novel, was going to be a standalone. Problem is, it wasn’t. When a writer finds good characters, it’s hard to let go of them. Joe developed in ways I didn’t expect. Louise (Weezy) started secondary, became major. I couldn’t leave them paddling down the Wakulla Rover near Panacea, Florida, realizing they were falling in love. 

 

As I wrote, I built a world I envision in ten or twenty years. Not so different from today in many ways. Cars steer themselves on main roads. The ubiquitous earphones of today have migrated into Bluetooth devices attached to the mastoid bone … much easier, right? Artificial Intelligence helps with a lot of tasks. The main difference, though, is cyberwar. After the fires, dam breaches, and a small nuclear meltdown, the United States responds by building the most extensive (also most expensive) firewall system in the world and tucks all “crucial” information behind it. Louise Napolitani is a government “tracker” sent to find Joe after he hacks through the firewall to try to save his wife, who ultimately dies of cancer. Weezy just … developed. A product of North End Boston and MIT, hacker extraordinaire, and a bona fide genius, she took over every scene she was in, so now she’s a co-protagonist.

 

And so I had a timeline I couldn’t escape, two characters I just had to give a chance to get in more trouble. I’m writing number five in the series. What would you have done?

 

The first and second in the series, Fatal Score and Skins and Bone, are available in eBook, trade paperback, and audiobook. The third, Fail Deadly goes on pre-order today. 

 

Fail Deadly

A Mayfield-Napolitani Thriller, Book 3

 

The CyberWar changed the world. Now it’s up to a financial whiz and a hacker extraordinaire to protect it. 

 

The grid is failing, the ransom demand is a billion dollars, and the only person who can save them has disappeared. Can she disarm an information data grenade before the country is plunged into darkness?

 

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